idea journal vol. 17 no. 1 (2020): interior technicity

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vol. 18, no. 01

2021 (extra)ordinary

interiors 01

(extra) ordinary interiors:

practising critical reflection vol. 18, no. 01

2021

the journal of IDEA: the interior design + interior architecture educators association

idea journal

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vol. 18, no. 01

interiors 02

idea journal

(extra) ordinary interiors:

practising critical reflection vol. 18, no. 01

2021

the journal of IDEA: the interior design + interior architecture educators association

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vol. 18, no. 01

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about

IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association) was formed in 1996 for the advancement and advocacy of education by encouraging and supporting excellence in interior design/interior architecture education and research within Australasia.

www.idea-edu.com

The objectives of IDEA are:

1. Objects

3.1 The general object of IDEA is the advancement of education by:

(a) encouraging and supporting excellence in interior design/interior

architecture/spatial design education and research globally and with specific focus on Oceania; and

(b) being an authority on, and advocate for, interior design/interior architecture/spatial design education and research.

3.2 The specific objects of IDEA are:

(a) to be an advocate for undergraduate and postgraduate programs at a minimum of AQF7 or equivalent education in interior design/interior architecture/spatial design;

(b) to support the rich diversity of individual programs within the higher education sector;

(c) to create collaboration between programs in the higher education sector;

(d) to foster an attitude of lifelong learning;

(e) to encourage staff and student exchange between programs;

(f) to provide recognition for excellence in the advancement of interior design/interior architecture/spatial design education; and

(g to foster, publish and disseminate peer reviewed interior design/interior architecture/spatial design research.

membership

Institutional Members:

Membership is open to programs at higher education institutions in Australasia that can demonstrate an on-going commitment to the objectives of IDEA.

Current members:

AUT University, Auckland Curtin University, Perth

Massey University, Wellington Monash University, Melbourne

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane RMIT University, Melbourne

University of New South Wales, Sydney University of South Australia, Adelaide

University of Tasmania, Launceston and Hobart University of Technology Sydney, Sydney

Victoria University, Wellington Affiliate Members:

Affiliate membership is open to programs at higher education institutions in Australasia that do not currently qualify for institutional membership but support the objectives of IDEA. Affiliate members are non-voting members of IDEA.

Associate Members:

Associate membership is open to any person who supports the objectives of IDEA. Associate members are non-voting members of IDEA.

Honorary Associate Members:

In recognition of their significant contribution as an initiator of IDEA, a former chair and/or executive editor: Suzie Attiwill, Rachel Carley,

Lynn Chalmers, Lynn Churchill, Jill Franz, Roger Kemp, Tim Laurence, Gini Lee, Marina Lommerse, Gill Matthewson, Dianne Smith,

Harry Stephens, George Verghese, Andrew Wallace and Bruce Watson.

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publishing

No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holders.

ISSN 2208-9217

eISBN 978-3-88778-918-3

Published by Art Architecture Design Research (AADR): aadr.info.

AADR publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice. AADR Curatorial Editor: Dr Rochus Urban Hinkel, Melbourne.

IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association) ACN 135 337 236; ABN 56 135 337 236

Registered at the National Library of Australia

idea journal is published by AADR and is distributed through common ebook platforms. Selected articles are available online as open source at time of publication, and the whole issue is made open access on the idea journal website one year after its date of publication.

idea journal editorial board

Dr Julieanna Preston, Executive Editor, Professor of Spatial Practice, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

Dr Anthony Fryatt, Program Manager, Bachelor of Interior Design (Hons), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Dr Susan Hedges, Senior Lecturer, Spatial Design, School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

Dr Antony Pelosi, Senior Lecturer, Interior Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Luke Tipene, Lecturer, School of Architecture, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia

external advisory panel

Dr Lilian Chee, SDE, National University of Singapore, Singapore Dr Helene Furjan, Westphal College of Design, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Professor Laurent Gutierrez, School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

cover image

Lying motionless, listless. Consuming time; being present, each moment folds into another. Surfaces becoming expanses of inflections of hue.

Normality expands into a stream of observing luminosity. Still image from video by Chora Carleton, 2021.

online publication editor

Dr Antony Pelosi, Senior Lecturer, Interior Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

copy editor

Dr Christina Houen, Perfect Words Editing design + production

Jo Bailey, School of Design, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand correspondence

Correspondence regarding this publication should be addressed to:

Dr Lynn Churchill c/o idea journal

Interior Architecture Curtin University

GPO Box U1987 Perth 6845

Western Australia

[email protected]

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this issue’s provocation

(Extra) Ordinary Interiors calls for contributions from academics, research students and practitioners that demonstrate contemporary modes of

criticality and reflection on specific interior environments in ways that expand upon that which is ordinary (of the everyday, common, banal, or taken for granted).

This theme has two agendas: First, the desire to amplify critical reflection as a key practice of the disciplines associated with this journal’s

readership. In short, to prompt interior designers, interior architects, and spatial designers to be more proactive and experimental in asserting their specialist knowledge and expertise as critical commentary. This asks

authors to reconsider the role of critique and criticism in their scholarly and creative works, or, to demonstrate how to reflect critically upon a design and to locate the design’s relation to material, political, social, cultural, historical and geographical concerns. Such an enterprise may reveal whether models of criticality centred on judgement, authority

and historicism are relevant, constructive, insightful or generative, or, as Bruno Latour poses, have they ‘run out of steam’? ⁰¹ This exercise may prompt some to revisit key thinkers who pose new discursive, visual and temporal models for critical practice in this recent age of criticality. We draw your attention to Critical Spatial Practice by Nikolaus Hirsch and

Markus Miessen, which asks for thinking “about ‘space’ without necessarily intervening in it physically, but trying to sensitise, promote, develop and

foster an attitude towards contemporary spatial production, its triggers, driving forces, effects and affects… [to] speculate on the modalities of production and potential benefits of the role of ‘the outsider.’”⁰²

We also look to Jane Rendell’s introduction to Critical Architecture, which asserts that criticism and design are linked together by virtue of their

shared interests in invoking social change.⁰³ Whether it takes written, built or speculative form, criticism is an action, which according to

Roland Barthes, is a calling into crisis, a moment where existing definitions, disciplinary boundaries and assumptions about normativity are put

into question.⁰⁴

The second agenda of this journal issue takes heed of the ordinary, and how, in its intense observation, what is normal or often taken for granted exceeds itself, becomes extra or more ordinary. Everyday spaces such supermarkets, service stations, laundry mats, hardware stores, parks and four-way street intersections, and banal gestures such as washing the

dishes, walking the dog or street sweeping become subject to critical scrutiny and introspection. Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, Julio Cortázar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves are but a few historic examples that draw out critical depth and aesthetic meaning about ordinary interiors, interiors understood in the

most liberal sense.⁰⁵ What new actions to the crisis of critical commentary lurk restlessly in ordinary interiors?

While a nostalgic or romantic response to this journal’s theme may dwell on interior situations with no special or distinctive features, or explore

the persistence and abundance of ordinary interiors, even commonplace spaces, noticed or not, it can not be denied that recent pandemic events world-wide have flung the many facets of everyday life into crisis, including long-standing notions of proximity, intimacy, hapticity, privacy, freedom

and rights to access ‘essential’ services. For many, the world has become home and home has become an internal world, an interior contaminated or augmented by virtual technologies serving as lifelines to a previous highly social and diversified lifestyle. As the interior of one’s domestic space finds coincidence with one’s isolation bubble, many are finding that interiority and interiors are conflating to take on new meaning, new function, and new configuration. Ordinary scenes of dead flies on windowsills, sun rays pointing to poor house-keeping habits, mounting bags of uncollected

rubbish and recycling, shuffling of mattresses, improvised work surfaces, revised chores rubrics, commandeering of the bathroom, and the

commodity of headphones and adapters highlight an intensified condition.

Authors are prompted to practice a form of critical reflection on one (extra) ordinary interior.

reviewers for this issue Charles Anderson, RMIT

Jen Archer-Martin, Massey University

Mary Ann Beecher, Ohio State University

Vincent Caranchini, Northern Arizona University Rachel Carley, AUT

Tania Chumaira, Aalto University

Elly Clarke, Goldsmiths, University of London Maria Costantino, University Arts London

Mig Dann, RMIT

Emma Filippides, Veldwerk Architecten Jill Franz, QUT

Anthony Fryatt, RMIT Sue Gallagher, AUT Kate Geck, RMIT

Susan Hedges, AUT

Ed Hollis, University of Edinburgh

Aymen Kassem, Lebanese University

Cathryn Klasto, University of Gothenburg Liz Lambrou, RMIT

Belinda Mitchell, University of Portsmouth Emily O’Hara, AUT

Remco Roes, Hasselt University Igor Siddiqui, University of Texas Lindsay Tan, Auburn University Nooroa Tapuni, AUT

Taneshia West, Auburn University Jiangmei Wu, Indiana University

01 Bruno Latour. ‘Why Has

Critique Run Out of Steam?

From Matters of Fact to

Matters of Concern,’ In Critical Inquiry - Special issue on the Future of Critique 30, no. 2 (2004): 25-248.

02 Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen, ‘Architecture and

Critical Spatial Practice,’ 1 May 2020, criticalspatialpractice.

org.

03 Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and

Mark Dorrian (Eds), Critical Architecture (Oxon UK, USA and Canada: Routledge, 2007), 4.

04 Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, translated and edited by Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (London and New York: The Althone Press, 1966).

05 Xavier de Maistre, Voyage

Around My Room, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (New York:

New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1994); Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, translated by Thomas Christensen

(San Francisco: North Point Press 1986); Virginia Woolf, The Waves [1931] (California:

Harvest Books, 1978).

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in this issue

07 introduction: extra’s ordinary interiors

Luke Tipene

Julieanna Preston

13 closed down clubs

Fiona Connor

26 occupying merzbau: the critic, her words and the work

Tordis Berstrand

49 lovers in an upstairs room: a layered portrait of a soft interior(ity)

Maria Gil Ulldemolins

65 re-collecting space: pre- and post-lockdown encounters with the grand gallery of the national museum of scotland

Edward Hollis

Rachel Simmonds

87 CO₂ interiors

Eduardo Kairuz Sam Spurr

113 opening expanding spaces: interiors in lacaton and vassal

Andrew Benjamin

126 transcoding structural ornamentation: a track-report of migrating characteristics around villa empain

Remco Roes

Usoa Fullaondo Koenraad Claes

151 extra-interior: makeshift practices and localised creative broadcasts

Sarah Burrell

173 apartment 203

Louise Martin

Dominic Robson

205 as an interior: reimagining gerhard richter’s atlas

Christina Deluchi

223 open letter as reparative interior: expanding, making, participating

Cathryn Klasto Jonathan Orlek

237 outside in: (extra)ordinary screenteriors in the era of virtual public interiority

Rana Abudayyeh

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2021 occupying merzbau: the critic, 26

her words and the work tordis

berstrand visual essay

Tordis Berstrand

Independent architect, scholar and writer

0000-0001-9971-7121 abstract

In the early twentieth century, German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

constructed the work Merzbau [Merz building] inside his studio in the family

residence in Hanover, Germany. The interior developed from a series of Merzsäulen [Merz columns] which eventually grew into a continuous spatial structure along

with three of the studio’s four walls. The central floor space was left empty while

some elements stretched across the ceiling above. Only three photographs, taken in 1933 by a local photographer, have survived as evidence of the work which

was destroyed by allied bombing during World War II. Schwitters had, by then, fled Germany and travelled to Norway where he would start the construction of a new Merz building. The following examines the Hanover Merzbau as a work

of art embedded in the fabric of a conventional residential house. It explores

how, employing the intermediary space of the artist’s studio, the work unfolded an inhabitable wall space built from scrap material collected from the streets

of Hanover. If Schwitters seems to have grounded himself between the interior and exterior of his house through the intricate weaving of a liminal living space, the following addresses this space between the ordinary/familiar and the

extraordinary/strange that Merzbau negotiated. It does so for the purpose of

framing the work’s attempt at transcending its everyday domestic setting. Radical writing strategies developed by French novelist George Perec (1936-1982) are

employed for experimentation with the way that insight into Merzbau is produced.

This approach involves detailed descriptions of places and scenes that complicate the extra/ordinary nature of these in pursuit of a space beyond named the ‘infra-

ordinary’. Three positions between the artwork Merzbau, the conventional dwelling house inside which it was built, and the critic evaluating the work, are developed for the purpose of foregrounding the act of writing as a critical and creative

spatial practice.

**occupying merzbau: the critic, her words and the work**

keywords:

Merzbau, infra-ordinary, spatial writing, architectural criticism

cite as:

Berstrand, Tordis, ‘Occupying Merzbau: The critic, her words and the work,’ idea journal 18, no. 01 (2021):

26–48, https://doi.org/10.37113/ij.v18i01.427.

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extra/ordinary

Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau is, by all means, an extraordinary work. This is not only so

because of the construction’s highly unusual appearance in contrast to the seemingly

ordinary house inside which it was built. The circumstance that neither house nor work

exists today means that three photographs captured in 1933 by the photographer

Wilhelm Redemann are the only surviving evidence of the structure (Figures 01-03).

Numerous accounts of Merzbau in its various stages of development have been given

by Kurt Schwitters himself, by his wife and son and visitors to the house, as well as

by historians, critics, and others who have

pieced the evidence and anecdotes together to produce an understanding of what the

photographs display.⁰¹ On this basis, what is attempted here is to explore the relationship between house and work — the ordinary

and the extraordinary — as a relation of co- dependence. Furthermore, to explore and articulate, in forms of writing that exceed

conventional practices of academic critique, how the convolution of site and work comes to constructively involve and engage the critic when discussing the work.

A relation between the ordinary and the extraordinary is developed through the

introduction of a third term from Georges

Perec — the ‘infra-ordinary’ — which is the title of a collection of texts written in the 1970s.⁰²

Here, Perec suggests that something lies beyond the extra/ordinary which is neither

one nor the other nor something in-between.

The concept of the infra-ordinary must, in spatial terms, be understood as something

beyond that barely exists. The infra-ordinary is

‘the opposite of events,’ as Perec explains.⁰³ It is

what we do when we do nothing, what we hear when we hear nothing, what happens when nothing happens …

those things which are the opposite

of the extraordinary, yet which are not the ordinary either — things which are

‘infra’ …

as the architect Paul Virilio elaborates when thinking back on his work with Perec on the French journal Cause commune in the early 1970s.⁰⁴

Merzbau, in this light, was anything but a non- event, but the house inside which the work

took form was an ordinary residential building relative to time and place. Furthermore,

Merzbau was created over the course of

several years during which Schwitters daily added more material and adjusted the

overall composition according to his Merz methodology. Thus, the work emerged in

close relation to the domestic life of the artist and his family and thereby inevitably became entangled in everyday events and non-

events, as well as this notion of nothingness characterising the infra-ordinary according to the architect. When Virilio further claims that, ‘In the city there is never a void. There is always background noise, there is always a symptom, a sign, a scent,’⁰⁵ he suggests

that the infra-ordinary signifies something which can barely take place, and when it

does, is something barely perceptible, barely happening, barely demarcating a space. Thus,

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it is a conceptualisation of a presence at the limit of sense-making with which one might nevertheless connect. It is the premonition of something beyond the surface of perceived reality that is both/and, extra/ordinary, not

fully empty, yet a notion of value in what might otherwise be perceived as valueless. The infra- ordinary becomes perceptible if one can tune in to it.

The questions emerging in relation to

Schwitters’ work that will be addressed in the following involve how, then, one gets to know Merzbau when neither work nor house exists?

How to tune in to the work and the artist’s

deeper motivation? Is it possible to actualise the work in writing like Perec actualised the streets and places of Paris when immersed in his chosen environments and describing these

‘flatly’ and without reminiscing?⁰⁶ What does it mean to actualise a site, a work of art, an

interior space, an event/non-event in writing?

How is it possible to write critically and with some form of certainty about Merzbau?

writing the everyday

For the purpose of ‘locat[ing] in the everyday something that reveals it,’⁰⁷ Perec challenges the limit of language and writing when

exploring whether the infra-ordinary lends

itself to description. For example, is it possible to place oneself in a situation, on a site, and

write down everything appearing before the eyes? Which means, is it possible to simply write what there is, one observation after

the other, in a deadpan neutral fashion?

‘You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most

common, most colourless,’⁰⁸ Perec guides the one who does not know how to ‘see more

flatly.’⁰⁹ Vision is the primary sense and writing is in the present tense — the observer is there and involved in the writing while every now and then announcing his/her presence in

the first person. Perec’s place-writings, as we may call them, are based on a set of fieldwork techniques that involve playful as well as

quasi-scientific approaches gleaned in part from the work of friends, collaborators and

philosophers of the everyday such as Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre.

With the researcher’s vigilant eye, Perec sets to work and writes (about) selected streets and places in Paris from the window seat in a café or while walking from house to house with a clipboard in hand. Most often, the

chosen spot is already familiar to the writer, although the mode of writing — which Perec defines as ‘sociological’ — does not attempt to recall or reconstruct personal memories.¹⁰ Rather, Perec describes what he sees, such as in the text Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien [An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris] (1975), where over the course of three days, a series of registrations are produced around Place Saint-Sulpice. The attempt to exhaust the chosen location by listing ‘what happens when nothing happens’¹¹ produces long lists of seemingly mundane phenomena where a tension exists between note-taking

and subtle composition of observations on the published page. Through the employment of

methods that register what appears before the eyes, Perec unsettles the objective of flatness when arranging his observations in small

narratives introduced by a note regarding

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each session’s date, time, location and

weather condition. Even when the singular statements are made successively, these can still be read as actualisations of the observed sites in compositions that play with form and structure.

Perec’s street/place-writings thereby perform critiques of conventional fieldwork while,

at the same time, challenging the notion

of objectivity usually associated with such.

The Geographer Richard Phillips notes that Perec’s fieldwork strategies de-familiarise scientific conventions as much as they

unsettle the everyday under scrutiny.¹² They do so by exaggerating the notion of plain

description to the point where it breaks down because the words reveal that more is at

stake than can be accounted for. ‘To write down simply, flatly what I saw there,’ is how Perec sets out his aim,¹³ but as Perec expert Andrew Leak comments, ‘What could be

more straightforward, or more impossible?

… These texts are haunted by the invisible.’¹⁴ In other words, Perec’s exaggerated flatness not only captures what he believes to see, but something unseen reveals itself in the process of writing and subsequently reading the text.

Perec’s pursuit of the infra-ordinary captures the everyday by replicating its repetition and routine rather than by framing the ordinary as something extraordinary — a tendency debated in everyday aesthetics because of

the tendency to frame the everyday as art for this purpose.¹⁵

perec and schwitters

Something in Perec’s writing on places and his profound interest in buildings resonates

with Kurt Schwitters’ work on Merzbau. Both Perec and Schwitters were deeply affected by World War II and, for both, the loss they suffered involved the unsettling of houses

and interior worlds. Something is also shared in the way that they both acknowledged the value of things left behind, such as objects

found in the street and the lives that these refer to as material for artistic creation. In the text

Espèces d’espaces [Species of spaces] (1974), the question of space is explicitly addressed by Perec who writes, ‘Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.’¹⁶ The statement arrives when Perec is reflecting on the precariousness of the spaces we inhabit and most often end up leaving behind. In this

context, to write is seen as an attempt ‘to try meticulously to retain something … to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows … to leave a trace.’¹⁷

The process of building Merzbau is a spatial journey and the history of what happens to a house when an artist in need of a place to live sets to work. It is what happens to the

walls of a seemingly ordinary dwelling house when the artist spatialises these for extended forms of occupation. If Merzbau foremost

is a work of art, an interior space, a kind of wall-architecture, a living room in a doubled

house, then to capture the work in writing is an attempt at wresting a few scraps from the void, full as it is. In the following, three positions

relative to Merzbau are written with the aim

to frame a series of encounters with the work.

Constellations of photographic evidence,

critical inquiry and creative forms of writing

outline three sites of critique that draw on the

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architectural critic Jane Rendell’s practice of

‘site-writing’. According to Rendell, such is a writing:

…that investigate[s] the limits of

criticism, that ask what it is possible for a critic to say about an artist or

architect, a work, the site of a work and the critic herself, and for the writing to still ‘count’ as criticism.¹⁸

Thus, the limits of writing are challenged when employing methods outside conventional

scholarship while also moving between disciplines as well as venturing outside the first, architecture, to return with new approaches to critical enquiry.¹⁹ Rendell’s background in education and the training of architectural students is reflected in

her focus on the site as a condition for the architectural practice to which she relates her writing. ‘Modes of working adopted

from the studio spatialise writing processes, resulting in creative propositions in textual form that critique and respond to specific

sites,’ Rendell explains with regard to her site- writing teaching methodology.²⁰ It is not only that architectural practice, in the sense of the design of buildings for a specific site, informs the writing of criticism, but that it does so

with the same level of creativity, risk-taking and experimentation employed in the studio.

Rendell explains:

My suggestion is that this kind of

criticism or critical spatial writing, in operating as a mode of practice in its own right, questions the terms of reference that relate the critic to the

work positioned ‘under’ critique. This is an active writing, composed of a

constellation of voices that spatially

structure the text, constructing as well as tracing the sites of relation between critic and work.²¹

performative writing

The encounter with Merzbau takes place on a site where the critic consciously and creatively positions herself in relation to the work and

the text she is writing. She is spatially aware of the conditions for making connections,

drawing up relations, and creating narratives between the chosen object of study and

herself. She summons surviving evidence for the purpose of conjuring a moment, an event, a situation in which the reader is invited to

become part of the work’s re-enactment. If the artwork no longer exists to evoke and support a given interpretation, surviving evidence in

diverse forms and media replace the direct

encounter and become the site of critique and writing. As suggested by art critic Gavin Butt,

‘Criticism today may find itself turning away from some of the established procedures

of critical practice precisely in order that it

remain critical.’²² Butt suggests that a focus on criticism’s inherent performativity, for example, leads to ‘a kind of criticism responsive to

the pressures and limits of the writerly acts

… foreground[ing] the performative, and

paradoxical, conditions of critical address’.²³ Butt is interested in the encounter with the object of study as an event beyond theory, which, like a spatio-temporal performance

event, relies on re-enactment on the scene of writing. Not only does art in the past century increasingly involve the audience, but the

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critic as spectator also becomes immersed in the work.

Performance scholar Della Pollock writes ‘Six Excursions into Performative Writing’ in the form of a list starting with the qualification of such writing as ‘evocative.’²⁴ This is a

metaphorical writing which gives presence to the absent performance/object by ‘expanding the realm of scholarly representation.’²⁵

Pollock’s list continues with qualifications of performative writing as ‘metonymic’ (always

partial); ‘subjective’ (the writer is related to the work); ‘nervous’ (collage); ‘citational’ (quoting the world); and ‘consequential’ (making

things happen).²⁶ On such a performative basis, scholarly writing might, according to Pollock, reclaim its ‘meaningfulness’ after

poststructuralism’s swirls of textuality, however constructive these have been for a more open discursive practice. Writing might ‘become

itself’ by ‘turning itself inside out’ and ‘making writing perform.’²⁷ In a manner that may serve to summarise the aim of the following piece of writing on Merzbau, Pollock writes:

Performative writing evokes worlds that are otherwise intangible, unlocatable:

worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect, and in-sight.

Whereas a mimetic/realist perspective tends to reify absent referents in

language, thus sustaining an illusion of full presence, a performative

perspective tends to favour the

generative and ludic capacities of

language and language encounters – the interplay of reader and writer in the joint production of meaning.²⁸

The critic performing her subject matter in a text might choose to write in the first person.

She thereby acknowledges her position as the author although her writing might not

actually be about herself. When scrutinising a couple of photographs to draw up a site for the interpretation of the artwork on display, she is not an eye witness in a direct sense either. Her vision of the work is one possible re-construction, and she invites the reader to participate in the creation of the text when, in the process of reading, the reader also inhabits the first person narrative.

i-site

Before entering the performative space in the next section, the writing subject must clarify the background for her engagement with the chosen work on the scene of

writing. By doing so, she seeks to justify the validity of her claims as well as her ability to perform the work in question. Will the writing otherwise count as scholarship? She gradually approaches her task by introducing the first

person in the form of herself.

I engage with Merzbau on the basis that I was already there some years ago. I studied the

literature — Schwitters’ own Das literarische Werk, vol. 1-5 [The literary work] and the

scholarship produced on the work during the last century.²⁹ I visited the Kurt Schwitters

Archive in Sprengel Museum Hanover,

which also displays the reconstruction of Merzbau developed by the architect Peter Bissegger (1981-83). I walked through

Waldhausenstrasse and spent some time near the site of number 5A where Schwitters’ house and Merzbau were built.

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Eventually, I traced and framed in writing

how scrap material collected from the streets of Hanover piled up inside the house and

swept through it like a sea of debris while accumulating into sculptural columns—

first collages, then assemblages, and finally

bricolages—cornerstones of an unusual spatial interior to come.³⁰

Schwitters not only built Merzbau on the back of the house, quite literally, but did so based on his Merz strategy for the transformation of throw-away material. In the space between

the extra/ordinary, Merz operated as a

recharger of everyday waste as material for a new interior architecture. Schwitters started

from the term Merz sampled from the German word Kommerz meaning trade or profit. If the irony of such connotations was not lost on the Dada-artist, then the reference to systems of value was important. In 1919, Schwitters wrote:

The word Merz essentially means the

combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes and, technically,

the in principle equal evaluation of individual materials. Merz painting,

however, not only makes use of paint and canvas, brush and palette, but all materials perceptible to the eye and all necessary tools. It is irrelevant whether the materials used were already

intended for some other purpose or not.

The pram wheel, the wire mesh, the

string and cotton wool are all elements of equal importance to paint. The artist creates by choosing, distributing and de-moulding such materials.³¹

So, I write here three positions relative to the three photographs captured by Redemann in 1933. The frontal framing of the work against three of the studio’s four walls appears to

have been a conscious decision made by the photographer or perhaps Schwitters himself. One could argue that it was done

this way with the aim to objectively approach the otherwise highly unusual, in some sense wild and transgressive work. With reference to George Perec, one could further suggest that the photographer framed the work flatly when photographing it without any trace

of engagement. From this perspective, the attempted neutrality towards the work’s

strong charge arguably captures Merzbau’s strangeness with a stillness and distance in the images that is puzzling and invites closer scrutiny of the work.

Such is attempted on this occasion by using creative writing strategies to open Merzbau for engagement beyond the photographic surface, the façade, as captured. Through

this writing, I seek to catch sight of the work’s infra-ordinary dimension when looking beyond the immediate strangeness of the structure to capture its inside on the outside, so to speak.

That is, I pursue a space where the charge

of the extra/ordinary work is ambiguous and something else appears in writing. Through this practice, I enter into a constellation with the absent work by confronting one image after the other while exploring possibilities

for the work’s articulation. Each time, a quote from either Schwitters or Perec sets the

writing in motion, followed by my impression of Merzbau sketched in a brief poetic form.

I trace the work as it appears to me while

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considering the limits of my writing — how spontaneous, vivid, poetic, precisely spaced on the page can it be? I forget academic

writing conventions to obtain writerly freedom and try out the words with which to express

what I see, know and imagine about the work. I give the writing a rhythm while, in

the second part, the writing shifts to lines of flat description à la Perec. Here, a series of

statements are drawn from the structure that seeks to capture the dynamism and coherence of the part of the sculptural wall displayed in

the photo. Eventually, in the third part, first

person narratives locate the writer and reader inside the house and work as witnesses to the emergence and endurance of Merzbau.

For each new photograph, the procedure starts afresh.

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Figure 01:

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau

(Treppeneingangsseite) [Merz building (stair entrance side)].

Photographed by Wilhelm

Redemann, 1933. bpk / Sprengel Museum Hanover.

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position 01 | the (ordinary) house

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to

name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text.

Georges Perec³²

Entering

white -wash -ness dark recess es

leaning lines

pointing edges shining lights

bright

signs numbers forms colours

hanging standing merging gaping gaps flaps straps traps

one two three four A o R

or

the lid of a paint bucket

an upside-down stringed instrument white shadows on black surfaces

doll’s head and lady face in glass box flashes

and mirror tricks within

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Sculptural wall

Assembly of uneven, fragmented forms covered in white paint Ad hoc constellation of irregular forms that merge and collide

Dynamic, expressive language of predominantly crystalline geometries Three sections forming part of a larger, coherent structure

Several cracks and gaps open to dark spaces between and behind protruding elements

Either side, openings leading to other spaces with a door open to another room to the right Smaller parts painted black while recesses and embedded glass boxes display objects

The structure continuing outside the picture frame although the floor is largely unseen

A letter ‘A’ splits into an arc above an ‘H’ where artificial light shines from a hidden space A doll’s head, a woman’s face and other objects sit on shelves towards the side of door Reflections visible in the glazing (is there a window in the opposite wall?)

A unifying whiteness holding it all together in one piece Bricolage

Waldhausenstrasse 5A (always already inside)

I am south of central Hanover inside a typical three-

storey apartment building belonging to a family named Schwitters. The house has an attic, a high basement and large windows of different shapes, sizes and styles facing south towards the street. It is 1918 and Schwitters’ studio is located inside this house where he also lives.

The basement’s layout is identical to the ground floor’s and a tall column-like sculpture is standing in the middle of a large room. It is 1919, or perhaps 1920, and I am not

sure whether the column is meant to hold up the house. Is the wall behind the column, which is covered in the same kind of collaged paper, part of the work or house or both?

Other families occupy the house and the artist’s studio is also his parents’ dining room. Art coexists with domestic chores and scenes in this space where another Merz

column is conceived and placed in front of a door. It is

1925, perhaps 1926, when visitors join Schwitters and his wife upstairs in the second-floor apartment.

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There are two options available here: either one enters the Biedermeier living room or the De Stijl living room. The

room with the black-painted carpet is a favoured choice because more Merz work is on display here.

When one family moves out, Schwitters relocates his

studio to the rear side of the ground floor apartment. It is 1927 and all the Merz columns are moved there and soon start merging with each other as well as the room’s walls.

On the balcony, in the front room, as well as on the attic,

there is Merz everywhere. Schwitters brings more building material into the house.

In 1933, I am contemplating the work from inside the

courtyard where Redemann takes the pictures. In front of me is the entrance to the stair which turns out to be a small internal ladder leading up to a room behind the part of Merzbau called Grosse Gruppe [Big Group]. The overall structure covers three of the walls but the centre of the

room is left empty. From here, I am enclosed by the work.

Merzbau is overwhelming to the eye, body and mind when it wraps around and draws you in. Behind me, the window has also been covered in white Merz paint.

Eventually, the entrance to the studio has to be closed

and someone moves a large cupboard in front of the door while all merzed areas of the house are being cleared.

It is 1937 and Kurt Schwitters has just left Germany and travelled to Norway, where he hides from persecution by political forces unaligned with the artistic outlook.

Later, I find the house with the rear half missing and a deep hole in the ground full of rubble. The exposed structure of the remaining half house hovers over the

scene for another few days before everything is removed.

It is 1943 and allied forces have just bombed Hanover and destroyed a number of houses on Waldhausenstrasse

including the rear half of number 5A.

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Figure 02:

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau (Blaues Fenster) [Merz building (blue

window)]. Photographed by

Wilhelm Redemann, 1933. bpk / Sprengel Museum Hanover.

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position 02 | the (extraordinary) work

[The column] is first of all just one of many, ten or so.

It is called Cathedral of Erotic Misery, or in short K d e E; we are living in the era of abbreviations. Besides, it is unfinished and that is a matter of principle. It

grows somewhat like the Metropolis; somewhere a

house is to be built and the planning authorities must ensure that the new house does not distort the whole cityscape.

Kurt Schwitters³³ City wall space

hanging ceiling standing top upside downside up

around and spin pointed pin

ice sea break

light inside

hide spider

twig leg twist

box cave small wheel

grotto glow table top

C

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Cathedral of erotic misery

Wildly growing, spreading and pointing downwards — like an ice sea falling from the sky

Splitting into smaller uneven parts, breaking down, doubling up

A column-like structure connecting earth and sky, floor and ceiling The lower part is not visible beyond the table to the right

The upper part is more developed and expansive

To the right, the structure is boxier, layered, stacked

As if there is a space behind from where the light shines through

As if there are many small spaces hidden in the gaps between or inside the boxes In the back, a window lets daylight in, and out

To the left, a darker space

In the centre, is it a ‘C’ or a horseshoe?

Three photographs (stitched together)

I stitch the images together in an attempt to reconstruct the work. Located in the centre of the room where

Redemann positions the camera, I turn on his axis in an attempt to comprehend the work’s configuration.

Redemann frames Merzbau up against the studio walls as if suggesting that Schwitters has constructed a wall-space.

In that configuration, I am facing the work’s internal façade while there might be no external one. When occupying the central void, I am both inside and outside the work.

There is one entrance to the room but I am already inside Schwitters’ double house from where a small opening in one corner leads further into the structure. In the opposite corner, another opening leads into another internal space.

A small living room is hidden behind Grosse Gruppe [Large group] from where the Merz courtyard can be

overlooked through a small hole in the wall. A library hidden behind the cathedral has a small window from where one

can look outside. A house, an artist’s studio, a living room, library, courtyard, garden, window to the world — I am in all

places at once and in no particular order. The Merz building is omnipresent and constructed according to its own Merz logic.

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Schwitters invites his friends and family over and they all

contribute to the building in various ways. He places tokens taken from them when they are not looking inside the

structure’s many hidden spaces and recesses. There are plenty of things to look at and many things taking place in the Merz house.

One could say that K de E is the pure forming of all the things, with a few exceptions, that were either

important or unimportant during the last seven years of my life; but into which a certain literary form has

slipped.

Kurt Schwitters³⁴

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Figure 03:

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau (Grosse Gruppe) [Merz building (big

group)]. Photographed by Wilhelm Redemann, 1933. bpk / Sprengel Museum Hanover.

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position 03 | merz (infra-ordinary)

The great secret of Merz lies in the value of

unknown quantities. This way Merz governs that which cannot be governed. And this way, Merz is larger than Merz. The secret lies in the fact that in

the union of a known and an unknown quantity, one changes the unknown when changing the known.

This is because the sum of the known and unknown always remains the same, must remain the same,

namely absolute equilibrium.

Kurt Schwitters³⁵

From the courtyard

to the other corner conglomeration upwards and folding within/without wrinkle and angle hatch to move and see through

back end space look out wheels below and roll flat floor front light up move

work In the folds

Merzbau turns a corner with a dramatically articulated upper part

The intricate, spatial folding pushes forward towards the centre of the room

Movement continues across the ceiling with a high, illuminated space opening up In the lower part, a stronger base with larger, less merzed areas

In the background, a blank piece of wall seemingly set off from the studio wall behind In the left corner, a free-standing column hovering slightly above the ground

Can it move? Roll out? Rotate?

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This part of the structure balances dynamism and stasis

With long, slim, projecting parts twisting downwards and grey-washed boxy forms stacking up

With deep recesses receding further into darkness and the notion that there might be a space behind To the right, an opening provides an entrance to a small ladder

Should I be able to get inside and turn right rather than left, I might find yet another space behind

Merz interior

Roaming around Merzbau after Schwitters left is like

tracing a life story inscribed in the folds of a work of art.

A work in the form of a spatial interior contained by the

studio’s four walls. A wall structure like a horseshoe house wrapping around a central courtyard. An empty space at

the centre opening towards a window with a northern view pointing in the direction the artist went (Norway). A three- dimensional mapping of a private universe up against the walls of a house in an increasingly hostile location. A chain of events that we piece together from a distance.

Merzbau is an architecture for tomorrow and a space of one’s own to live today. Before time catches up with the double walls built from scraps and left-overs picked from the streets of the city. A place turned inside out when

material is remoulded into something altogether different.

A framework retained when weaving a new fabric of a whole town recast as a house inside a house. Washing over the work in white to unite while claiming that all uneven parts sing together in a momentary harmony before falling again apart.

Moving around inside the structure, small spaces and

hidden doors emerge for exploration of things belonging to old friends. Spaces behind layers of material and paint so deep that I might never find them and the things that they hold. Merzbau is a structure secretly alive with memories of the past. An inhabitable artwork open for interpretation, co- creation, exploration, articulation, continuation, and so on.

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As a matter of principle, Merz has no programme with a predetermined goal. Merz starts from very

specific conditions and processes what is available accordingly.

Kurt Schwitters³⁶ Merz loop

After the work and writing, the text remains as evidence of an encounter with the historical space. The artwork has been performed and thereby opened for critical

engagement in a manner exceeding conventional scholarship. The performance has ended, or has it?

According to Gavin Butt, criticism is paradoxical in that it conventionally sets itself apart from received wisdom when judgement is passed.³⁷ Criticism provides a novel perspective, a counter-argument, yet Butt suggests that such a critical para-procedure itself risks becoming doxa over time. Criticism must, therefore, turn again and do

something else, which means to seek less confrontational modes of practice, for example. It might draw from the

performativity of its address by speaking to its object,

reader and writer in a different way. Such a critical agency might open a space, articulate a possibility, perhaps still

run a risk, yet when Merzbau continuously rises from the (screen) page — like a pop-up structure folding back again after reading — new perspectives on the work emerge.

Writing in the 1970s, literary critic Hayden White

advocated that historians should make use of insights from contemporary science and art when articulating

their objects of enquiry without the constraints of illusory objectivity and fact-finding.³⁸ For White, ‘The possibility of using impressionistic, expressionistic, surrealistic,

and (perhaps) even actionist modes of representation for dramatising the significance of data’ was permission granted to a history-writing open to multiple perspectives on the historical object.³⁹ According to White, there had

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been no such examples of experimental historiography up until the 1970s, at least not outside the strictly literary circles. In other words, it was about time that new kinds of agency took form in other academic disciplines

such as, for example, the present re-enactment of the

historical object that is Merzbau. Making use of Schwitters’

strategies of collage and montage, as well as performance, poetry and other narrative practices, Merzbau is actualised on the page – the site of the critical encounter – with the

aim to capture the dynamic, expressive form and force of

Schwitters’ sculptural wall. The configuration of artist, work, text, critic, and reader informs three critical positions in

the attempt to let something appear in writing not hitherto discovered and articulated about the work. On this basis, it is argued that criticism, by means of performative writing strategies, unfolds its argument by staging it.

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acknowledgements

This work acknowledges the resources made available by organisations

committed to preserving the legacy of Kurt Schwitters’ life and work. This especially

applies to the Sprengel Museum Hanover, Germany, and the Littoral Arts Trust, UK.

Also, many thanks for the constructive

comments from the appointed reviewers.

author biography

Tordis Berstrand is an independent architect, scholar and writer based

in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has worked and taught architectural thinking and

practice in the UK and China and also been involved in performance-based

education with the artist Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester (Goodiepal). Her current research

revolves around the poetics of the shared living space, critical spatial writing

practices, and the Dada-artist

Kurt Schwitters’ Merz aesthetics.